There’s a mighty black and white, six minutes long documentary film enclosed to the italian progressive rock band PFM / Premiata Forneria Marconi Stati di Immaginazione (States of Imagination) music album.  Its title is La Conquista (The Conquest), it shows how a savage Indios tribe succeeds in building, with very poor means, a bridge crossing a very dangerous river, to ensure its survival.

The images are very impressive, I found them on www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_IPOqwZ6bw (PFM Premiata Forneria Marconi – La Conquista) and www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M57YmoWIVY (PFM Premiata Forneria Marconi – La Conquista – Studio 2006).

The soundtrack is very agreeable, too.

While thinking of writing this piece, it also came to my memory the well known B. Traven’s novel The Bridge in the Jungle, and how differently the two bridges were designed and built, though in very similar environments, and their background and output.

There’s a ‘conquest’ in this novel, too, but it’s an ‘un-quest’ instead, a desperate search of a disappeared much beloved kid, Carlos-ito, by his mother Carmelita and her people.

The – material – cause of this fatal accident is that Carlosito crosses for once in his life the many times crossed bridge wearing his brand new shoes, to which he was never used, therefore losing control of his balance.  So he falls  into the river – and dies.

Nor I could neglect the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse, Kansas City, Missouri, USA, July 17, 1981 – 114 killed, 216 injured – and the Ramsgate walkway disaster, UK, Sept. 14, 1994 – 6 killed, 7 injured.

And more examples could be unfortunately quoted: behind the reception desk of the Milan, Italy, head-quarters of a large, multinational construction company, there was campaigning a large black & white  photograph showing the upper structure of a bridge or a dam over a very turbulent south american river; a worker was standing on the concrete pavement, some thirty yards over the foaming waters; he was wearing a yellow helmet all right, but he had no device whatsoever to prevent him from falling into the river.

THE AUDITING DILEMMA
Bridges and walkways were all designed and built based on audits, the former performed by “savage” Indios according to their instinct, the latter by educated north-western engineers.

Yet there’s a basic difference between design and construction of the two bridges above: Indios’ bridge had to be safe for Indios themselves, the engineers’ bridge had to be safe for the trucks crossing the river.

I don’t know about the Hyatt Regency walkway but – according to the UK magazine Quality World – the Ramsgate walkway was designed and made just to pass its certification audit.

The approaches are evidently different:

Being the river infested by alligators and piranhas, the wise Indios first tested their youth by head-down bungee jumping, then the best performer was launched to the opposite side of the river by means of a vegetable rope oscillating like a pendulum, until the boy fastened the rope he had with him to the selected tree.

Quite differently, the engineers built their bridge with robust wood coming 1,500 miles away and, since they were very cost minded, did not care to build the bridge with side protections to prevent any one falling down into the dangerous river.

Putting aside the imagery and novel fiction, we should expect the walkways designed by educated engineers, manufactured, installed and tested under their supervision, to pass any reasonable safety audit.

Were it not so, how could audits – often expensive, lengthy, intruding and obtrusive – could be relied upon?  Which brings us to the critical question: How secure are you audits?  Let’s look at a few

COUNTERFEIT TRADE
Counterfeiting trades first started with cheap, easy to copy and make products.  However  nowadays counterfeiting trades infect high-value and -volume markets, such as electronics: italian counterfeited imports now rate electronics at the top, garments and toys follow; and only a few years ago it was the opposite.

And the EU is no barrier to counterfeit imports.  Once a complacent member country has cleared the import through its customs, it can freely circulate within the whole EU countries.

The next frontier of counterfeited trade may well be counterfeiting information, ideas, concepts: successful business-making depends to a large extent on having and using the right information – or idea – at the right time.

It’s no news that effective market intelligence is crucial to a company’s success, just as it’s no news that internal or external espionage may break a company down.

Audits have therefore to be developed further, they have to be designed and made – engineered – not to look for conformity only but primarily to detect flaws and leaks, both actual and possible.

In some sense, quality – be it internally or externally perceived – is an end product, it has a starting and a finishing point.  W hat it concerns companies most is the way in between instead – the time required to run it, its obstacles are what should be carefully controlled via audits.

PERCEPTION LINKED TO AUDITS
I think that sometimes it comes down to perceptions, specifically on the auditees’ willingness to be audited and on the auditor’s knowledge of the specific audit matter.

I’m just thinking of myself auditing my bank or my insurance company or the political organization/administration of the town where I live. Provided they would allow me to access their records, I would hardly understand them, I would be fooled any time, any way.

Many an organization, mostly due to cost-saving policies, resort to one-man audit jobs, even at critical hierarchy levels, thus making self-audit skills crucial, or having to have internal auditors to do much of the heavy auditing lifting to determine and adequate level of audit assurance.  But, how much can we rely on the internal auditors?

The intrinsic risks are evident: in spite of some traditional or complacent approach, audits are measuring tools, what else they would be, or used for?

The challenge is that Individuals’ self-audits are doomed to be biased.  It’s in the human nature, both positively and negatively.

The queen asking her mirror to praise her own beauty is not a trivial tale.  All of us face the same challenge.

Self-audits have not to considered – mainly – as an assessment of how I’m right or I’m good, they should also be, firstly, a check-list of questions putting one own’s performance on the job under a different light, looking at it from different perspectives.

Doubt is father of all certainties.

Continual change, aimed to short- to medium-term improvement, or the desk syndrome

Continual improvement still is an embarrassing requirement for most organizations: they – sometimes, not always – know where and when they fail, less often how and why.

Requiring them to continually improve looks like asking a wolf not to devour sheep or chicken; but there’s one thing that organizations keep doing, that is change.

In times of distress we’ve all experienced it.  We change the places and the things we’ve on our desk.  We change the pictures in our office room.  We re-arrange how our computer files were organized.

In a word, when a system is under enough pressure it changes some of its less functional structures, to maintain the primary processes in place.

SO WHAT?
World can’t even be imagined existing without audits.  Are we really willing to keep doing poor, un-motivating audits?  Or are we – through increasing our awareness and training – to correct and prevent their failures?

The old Indio of the documentary didn’t even move but he knew how to build a safe bridge.